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From Sierra Leone to Selly Oaks…and Beyond

By Anna Carter
November 11, 2009 at 10:17 am

Last week I was fortunate enough to join colleagues from diverse Red Cross backgrounds in a rather unusual conference. The conference brought together staff and volunteers from several Red Cross backgrounds; humanitarian education, refugee services, fundraising and international departments were all represented. And so we all united in Selly Oaks, eager to learn. The conference took place at the Centre for Responding to Conflict in Selly Oaks, where we were guided ably through the two days by Joan MacGregor. Both Joan and Responding to Conflict have long associations with Sierra Leone and the work of the Red Cross in this area.

The guests of honour were two women from Sierra Leone, who do remarkable work in conflict transformation. Working in local communities, in a fractured post conflict environment, these women and many others like them work to rebuild Sierra Leone in the wake of over ten years of civil war. It is not just the physical damage that needs to be repaired, but the relationships within communities that have been fractured through violence.

 The British Red Cross supports the work that the Sierra Leone Red Cross are undertaking, which is ground breaking for the organisation. Providing aid in the immediate aftermath of crisis; the Red Cross movement is known internationally for its ability to coordinate relief aid. In Sierra Leone the Red Cross society wanted to provide more than immediate relief and look more holistically at what the people in crisis needed. Basic provision such as food, water and shelter: yes. But also to harmonise tensions that had been created in the communities through the violence of the conflict. So that the underlying tensions would not simmer in the populous, ready to boil over into violence again.

 Nancy, Supervisor for the CAR (Child Advocacy and Rehabilitation) centre in Kailahun District, spoke about the work that she does with children who were once involved in the conflict. Some of these children (both male and female) had been combatants; child soldiers, others had been the ‘wives’ of the men whilst they had been in the bush, others has witnessed a great deal of violence to their kin during the conflict.

Those that work on the CAR projects advocate on the child’s behalf in order to reunite them with their communities. They train the young people, who missed out on schooling due to the fighting, in a trade. Some of these directly impact the communities that have been affected by the conflict. Those who learn carpentry and bricklaying have the chance to physically rebuild what had been destroyed.

Ella, Animator for the CAPS (Community Animation and Peace Support) programme with the Sierra Leone Red Cross, spoke to us about the work that she does with communities affected by the conflict. Animators live within a community for eighteen months at a time, with a view to leaving the community more resilient and able to resolve conflict that may arise internally.

It was a fantastic experience, to meet and talk to Ella and Nancy and to listen to the achievements that they have made in communities in Sierra Leone. It was also hugely useful to learn from their experiences and understand how we can use their learning in the UK. I found a lot of the work of the CAR project very relevant for the work that we undertake with young refugees.

The experiences of the young people in Sierra Leone, which seem alien to me, will not seem so distant for many of the young refugees with whom I work. Violence and conflict are often the impetus for the young people to leave their homes and seek refuge in another country. The holistic approach that the CAR teams take when working with young people is one that I will seek to replicate here. The young people that come to the refugee projects are often dislocated from the communities that they live in here in the UK and so the work of the CAR project is perhaps not so disassociated from my world and my work as I first imagined.

The learning that I gained in Selly Oaks will inform the work that I do in the future, here on the south coast. And so the work that began in Sierra Leone will be amplified many times around the areas that the workshop participants came from and have returned to.

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Tags: conflict, Humanitarian Education, International, refugees, Sierra Leone, young refugees

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